The great country of desert and mountain ranges between Santa Fé and the Pacific coast was not yet mapped or chartered; the most reliable map of it was in Kit Carson’s brain. This Missourian, whose eye was so quick to read a landscape or a human face, could not read a printed page. He could at that time barely write his own name. Yet one felt in him a quick and discriminating intelligence. That he was illiterate was an accident; he had got ahead of books, gone where the printing-press could not follow him.

~ Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop